MY FLORAL STORY

Hi, I'm Kels.

Long before flowers became my work, they were simply part of the kind of world I was always trying to create around myself.

I've been a romantic for as long as I can remember. As a little girl, I was completely enchanted by stories like The Secret Garden, Little Women and Beauty and the Beast — not just for the stories themselves, but for the worlds they seemed to open up. Old houses and rambling gardens, candlelight and handwritten letters, climbing roses, beautiful dresses and rooms that looked as though generations of people had lived and loved within them.

I don't think I ever really grew out of it.

These days, I'm still happiest pottering around my garden, bringing armfuls of flowers inside, rearranging a room for the hundredth time, baking something in the kitchen or disappearing into an old novel with a cup of tea. I'm forever noticing the tiny details — the first rose of the season opening, afternoon light through an old window, a flower growing somewhere it wasn't planted.

Somewhere along the way, all of those little pieces of me found their way into my flowers too.

Before Where the Roses Grow, there was Herbs & Homesteading — my first little creative venture and a place for all the things I loved: gardening, flowers, homemaking, candles and creating things by hand. Slowly, the flowers began taking up more and more room, until one day they became the whole story.

And Where the Roses Grow, well... grew.

THE WORLD BEHIND THE FLOWERS

I've always been drawn to things that feel as though they belong to another time — old English gardens, beautifully lived-in country homes, faded florals, well-loved books and all the little details that make a place feel warm, romantic and full of story. I'm endlessly inspired by:

  • Roses climbing weathered walls, rambling cottage gardens & flowers growing wherever they please

  • Timeworn interiors, antique paintings, faded florals & treasures collected over a lifetime

  • The English countryside, old conservatories, flower markets & the beauty of the changing seasons

  • Classic novels, period films, romantic heroines & the quiet beauty found in ordinary life

I think what I love most is the feeling behind all of these things — nothing too polished or perfect, but layered, lived-in and loved. A garden that has been growing for generations, an old book with softened pages, flowers gathered for the kitchen table. Perhaps that's why I've never thought of flowers as simply something beautiful to put in a vase. To me, they're part of the feeling of a place — and I hope a little of that feeling finds its way into everything I create.

A LIFE AMONGST THE FLOWERS

The older I get, the more I realise that Where the Roses Grow isn't really separate from the life I love living.

The garden comes into the studio. The flowers come home to the kitchen table. Something I've read in an old book will inspire an arrangement weeks later. The colours changing outside my window somehow find their way into the flowers I'm choosing at the market.

And somewhere amongst all of it is motherhood — the most important part of my life, and really, the reason I began creating a business of my own in the first place.

I wanted work that could grow alongside my little boy, rather than a life that asked me to choose between being his mum and following a dream of my own. Where the Roses Grow has grown around nap times, kindy days, school runs and all the ordinary little moments in between. My baby needed to fit alongside my dream, or there was never much point in the dream at all.

It's all a little tangled together.

And I think I like it that way.

I love a home filled with flowers, muddy shoes by the back door, something cooking slowly in the kitchen, beautiful old books stacked on tables and the sound of my little boy somewhere amongst it all. I love that the flowers I bring home from the studio become part of our home, just as pieces of our life so often find their way back into my work.

Flowers have become my way of sharing a little piece of that world with other people.

Some leave my studio to celebrate the happiest days of someone's life. Others say I love you, I'm thinking of you, I'm sorry, or simply these made me think of you.

I get to make them all here, while building a business I love around the life that matters most to me.

And after all this time, I still think that's rather lovely.